FXall

Alstom goes live with FXall's internal corporate dealing solution

Alstom, the global leader in equipment and services for power generation and rail transport, has deployed a white label version of FXall's QuickOMS solution for its internal corporate dealing requirements. It is used to link together Country Treasury in Switzerland with its treasury headquarters in Paris and may be potentially extended to Country Treasuries in Germany, Norway, Sweden and the UK. Alstom is using FXall's internal corporate dealing system to help it:

• Electronically transmit trading requirements to Central Treasury
• Net requirements internally before trading to reduce execution costs
• Automatically book trades after execution for real-time STP, including back-to-back trades with subsidiaries
• Use the comprehensive entitlement model to control which people in which countries can trade in the market
• Ensure compliance with corporate policies using a full audit trail

"FXall's white label solution to internal dealing means that we can more efficiently manage treasury activity across multiple locations", says Mr Cédrick Cornec, Head of Front Office, at Alstom. "It integrates seamlessly into our TMS and with automatic post-trade processing it completes the entire trade processing lifecycle."

Accelor White Paper: Algorithmic trading and how technology is shaping the future of the FX market

FXall has launched a White Paper on Algorithmic trading which looks at the how algorithmic trading and technology is shaping the future of the FX market. The paper examines how the technology solutions and services provided by Accelor, FXall's anonymous Electronic Communications Network (ECN), have been designed to meet the needs of this growing and rapidly developing market.

The rise of hedge funds and algorithmic trading in FX is a key trend identified by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in the preliminary results of its latest survey announced on 25 September. The BIS reported that the FX trading volumes of financial institutions grew by 30% compared with 11% for reporting dealers since its last survey in 2004. FXall's White Paper, entitled 'Algorithmic Trading In The Global FX Market: The Need For Speed, Transparency And Fairness', looks at the implications of this trend for the future of FX trading in terms of the ever more complex technological needs and increasing discernment of market participants in selecting trading venues.

The paper highlights how the foreign exchange market is following the trend that is now well advanced in the equities market, where the use of automated, complex trading strategies has helped fuel the rise of ECNs. Hedge funds are successfully applying algorithmic strategies to FX trading to generate alpha, using many of the same methods they have applied in the equities market and other asset classes. This trend has injected more liquidity into the FX market - the world's largest financial market. The market is further evolving in 2007 as participants seek the optimum technology to implement their strategies, fuelling the growth of FX as an asset class in its own right.

Accelor, introduced in 2007, is at the vanguard of technology designed to meet this need, and provides market professionals with the execution tools and market data they require such as:

• An anonymous central limit order book that honours price-time priority, the principle that the order entered earliest gets executed first providing a fair market
• A full order book echo which details every order that is placed and removed from the book
• Time and sales information for completed trades
• Speed in placing, cancelling and filling orders as well as distributing market data
• Security in knowing executions are within credit limits

According to Jim Kwiatkowski, Head of Sales, Americas "As algorithmic trading continues to grows in importance in foreign exchange trading, so does the issue of transparency for both market data and business rules. Accelor goes beyond what has been available to the market until now by coupling a unique architecture that delivers the transparency necessary for fairness and the reduction in latency required to minimize trading risk."

To request a copy of the White Paper email info@fxall.com